and please understand darling i'll be there soon
by jackiekennedy
Summary: AU. It's only fair though, he reasons, that he should be the one who chases her across ten, fifty, a hundred lifetimes, if it means she'll eventually come back to him. Katniss and Peeta through several time periods, before Panem existed.


Hi! So, let me start off by saying this is not an original idea. If you like Puck and Quinn from _Glee_, I wrote a story basically identical to this one called **"and the history books forgot about us." **This story is pretty much the same premise and all, just with different time periods and, of course, different characters. But yes, basically, I am unoriginal. I always wanted to expand on it and got many requests to do so, but I knew Quinn and Puck's version was done. So! I present you with this. Secondly, I will repeat I am not a history buff by any means. Most I've what I've learned comes from the American Girl dolls series and Rugrats. Lastly, Katniss is the biggest enigma to write, holy cannoli.

Now, with all that in mind, enjoy!

* * *

"_All ages are beautiful and cruel, only love makes the difference."_

* * *

**Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – 1753**

It's fitting the story starts when he first comes to America.

He still feels the rats, the dampness, the feverish hunger and thick anxiety crawling up his skin and through his veins, the sounds of children dying and mothers throwing them overboard and death, death, death.

A freckle of sunlight cozies up next him, and he looks up, looks at the blue sky and the lemon sun for the first time in months, and when he glances back, he feels the wind knock out of him as he stares at a pair of sharp grey eyes, waiting at port and toying with the fabric of her uncorseted linen dress. Eyes that aren't looking him – not looking at anything really – but Peeta is looking.

He's _looking_.

Feels the weight of his world shift off its axis and start to revolve around her instead.

* * *

His family starts their living by working at a bakery a few streets down from the port of Philadelphia. It's popular among the French with the butter loafs and raisin biscuits and wafers, and he becomes a reliable source of income because his father is starting to look sickly and his brothers already died on the voyage and his mother does not look at him anymore when he says her name.

Grey Eyes comes into the shop a handful of times a month, trades fresh game for a couple of rolls.

He feels a strange ticking in his blood when she's around.

* * *

"Blacksmith, wheelwright, even a _cabinetmaker_ for goodness's sake."

His mother sits at her spinning wheel, weaving wool and complaints until he can't tell the difference. He leans closer towards the dull oil lamp and tries sounding out the words from his pamphlets. He pronounces them in different ways, tries to remember how the men said it out loud in the bakery, learns to make sense of the letters himself.

"Wasting your time! Wretched child, all of our time!" his mother screeches.

* * *

He honestly hasn't been here long enough to know what land belongs to the English and what belongs to the French and he hasn't even _seen_ an Indian yet. He still can't read the pamphlets fully, but at least he can sound out the ingredients at the bakery instead of smelling them first.

* * *

"What do I call you?" She whips her head around, one foot out the door, sunlight outlining her frame with her mouth a little a gap. "I've been calling you Grey Eyes," he confesses.

Silence. He instantly regrets it – maybe should have asked where she gets the fresh game instead – and moves to rearrange some of the loaves to look like he wasn't affected, like this girl whose looks and mystery hasn't entranced him since the moment he stepped foot onto America. He's about to retreat for more flour when he hears, "Katniss."

She doesn't smile, only nods a little in confirmation, and he notices some faded scratches on her forehead. He's about to speak, egg her on with more conversation, but she's already halfway out the door when she says, "I've been calling you the Boy with the Bread."

So it's _Katniss_, or so she says, and his blood keeps ticking and he fits in this feeling where his pulse is caught somewhere between her and this new world.

His father dies that night.

* * *

"How do you do it?" They are out of the rolls she normally trades for, and when he offers a raisin loaf instead, she protests fervently. He tells her it will take awhile for him to make more, but she insists on waiting.

After a moment, she says, "I hunt."

"Is that right?" he asks, bemused. "Never met a lady who could." He backtracks quickly. "I mean – I meant – didn't mean offense, ma'am. I'm – well – I'm impressed."

"Oh." She blinks. "Thank you." Her eyes stray, and she glances at the desk and notices one of his pamphlets.

"You are interested in the dispute?"

She looks at him quizzically. He motions his head towards the paper as he moves towards the oven. "Between the French and English?"

"You can read?"

He laughs shyly. "I'm learning."

"But you can?"

"A bit, yes."

"Could you teach me?"

* * *

He doesn't have the time for this, realistically he doesn't. His mother has confined herself to bed for no good reason, and he has the house to take care of. The chickens and the fences and the crops and the bakery.

But it's awful, really, how quickly his thoughts abandon him whenever she licks her lips, like a swan migrating at the first sign of winter.

* * *

She's there in the early mornings, before the bakery opens.

He doesn't say anything. Increasingly, he realizes with Katniss, he doesn't need to. She has learned to fill the gaps in his sentences; silence that echos, reverberates, then fades.

* * *

A-P-P-L-E. Apple.

He learns she lives with the Lenape Indians, needs to learn to read English to help them. Excuse him – not _lives_ with them, _is_ one. Wild in her heart and in her blood.

C-H-A-I-R. Chair.

"My father was one," she reveals. _Was_, like how her Anglo mother _was _and her younger sister _was_.

"Then who were you waiting for at port?"

"What?"

"I saw you when I first arrived. I noticed you first."

S-O-N-G. Song.

"I wasn't waiting for anyone." She lowers the parchment and looks at him. "I was mourning. For what you've lost and what you will lose."

There's a moment, maybe the world stops, maybe it speeds up, but it's their moment as he cups her face with his hand and she hesitates – eyes ablaze – before she rests her cheek against his palm. He hovers only for a moment before using his lips to fill the space between them.

L-O-V-E. Love.

* * *

Scratch of a quill against parchment. She fiddles with the feathers.

He notices things about her. She has skin tanned like bourbon and fine lips that speak wiser than most, she has a body, a slight frame of bones that he keeps his heart in.

* * *

She takes him out to the forests only because he asks.

But when he looks at her, he sees no Indian. No war paint or feathers or animal hides like in the pictures from back home. Just a girl with a bow too big for her body and scars too thick for her youth.

Somewhere in the woods he draws her cheek to his, kisses the side of her face again and again, until the motion losses meaning. Until there's nothing in the world but her and him; the way it should be.

He really is only just a boy, too.

* * *

The Lenape are siding with the French. "Where they go, I go," she says fiercely.

He would let her do anything she wanted if she'd just stay but she doesn't know that, and half the time, he doesn't know it either so they go along like this. Peeta doesn't know what she feels, how she feels, but he thinks she's different, much like he is. Feels a little more than others do.

Because when he hurts, he really hurts.

But when he loves.

"The Boy with the Bread," she whispers, and then she's mouthing it, like a mantra to herself.

(She doesn't not kiss him.)

* * *

It happens without warning. She just doesn't come into the bakery anymore.

He hears the sounds of cackling fire, customers walking in, ships coming to port, cannons firing in the distance. It is not his war, but it is his heart that is out there.

* * *

He learns from word of mouth that the Lenape are switching alliances to the British.

He refuses to leave the bakery, sleeps there if he has to, and waits for Katniss to come through the door any day now.

The bridge he has drawn between them is sinking, and he feels like he's holding the water with just his bare hands.

* * *

Years pass.

His mother dies.

He wonders if they shouldn't have come to America, if they should've just stayed home and avoided the New World, avoided war, and avoided death. Avoided Katniss (oh, he'll _try_, he just doesn't realize for how long).

He's buried his whole family now.

* * *

The war ends.

She doesn't come back.

* * *

But in darkest corner of his mind, he hears her calm, gentle laughter rippling through the wind. It's the one that scares him the most, the one he fears, the sound of her quiet detachment.

But it shakes through him, like a chill of moonlight gliding across a lake.

He takes it to his grave, cradles it with his hands until it rots away with him and blooms into a field of wild grass and dandelions.

* * *

**St. Louis, Missouri – 1835**

They sit next to each other at common school, trotting corn and cabbage in their rusty lunch pails and reciting "_A is for Apple, for Adam's Fall, B is for Book, the Holy Bible I do attend._" He never pulls on her pigtails because – well – give him a little credit.

Then one day, she brings him home by the hand and tells her mother his parents are dying from influenza. She flies through the cabin door and holds down her dark green bonnet, a mess of chocolate curls spilling out from her braid. "Can we keep him?" she demands, and he sniffles.

* * *

Peeta and his older brother survive, and Mrs. Everdeen just places a hand on their shoulders and scurries them inside her home.

He has one hand clutching on a tattered blanket and another desperately reaching out for Katniss.

* * *

They grow up together and into each other.

As though anyone else even knows the meaning of a _normal_ family, let alone the way it makes your blood pulse when you wrap fingers around each other's throats and hold tight.

At night they sleep cheek to cheek and wake up with their hands red and sore and dented from how they have clutched each other. The nights find them thrashing side by side in their sheets, strangling their cries with their hands. They wake up smothered in their sheets, in their pillows, and in their skin.

* * *

"Father," she calls from the table. It is spring, and the snow is thawing and rain is falling and the roads are unmovable. "What is a Yankee?"

Peeta helps him adjust the logs in the fireplace. Mr. Everdeen kisses the top of his daughter's head and laughs. "Why, you are, my dear."

"And you?"

"And me as well."

She points a sewing needle at Peeta. "And Peeta?"

_I am whatever you are,_ he thinks.

* * *

They start young. Curious kids, intelligent but maybe not in a good way, and everyone always knew it would get them into trouble, but this isn't the sort they'd have guessed.

He threw her in the pond one summer, all of fourteen years old, but she grew early and the white of her shirt clung to the pink curve of her skin and he stared and later licked the line of her neck and then lower, lower, _lower_.

They started early, and they didn't stop.

* * *

"The Oregon Trail," Mr. Everdeen keeps repeating. He picks up Prim and twirls her in the air, her golden braids shimmering and cheeks sore from giggling.

Peeta looks at Katniss, and she just shrugs. But her expression is not full, not entirely convinced, pulled tight around her smile like a dress that doesn't quite fit.

* * *

"Are you all packed?" he reaches to tuck some hair behind her ear, but she shudders away and moves to the opposite side of the kitchen, carefully tucking apples into a woven basket. "Don't be scared. I promise I won't let anything happen to you."

She scoffs. "I don't get scared easily."

He smiles that same smile he made against her skin before licking his way up her jaw. "I didn't say easily, but someone does all the same."

* * *

They set off in a large group the following year.

Peeta's brother tells elaborate tales about Oregon to pass the time, with its streets made of gold and air smelling of flowers. The sunrises are so pink they could be raining strawberries. The water is sweeter, the sun is brighter, and the trees are larger and happier and there is wealth for all of them to bathe in.

"We're pioneers!" he exclaims, and Prim laughs with the turning wheel of their ox wagon.

* * *

And then Mr. Everdeen starts to cough.

* * *

"What do you think is really out there?" Peeta asks one night. They layer frock coats over the sheets and hide under the covers and stick their noses out of the frayed holes to breathe. Thunder looms in the background.

"I don't know," she whispers. "Whatever we're looking for, I hope."

They're too old now to not think realistically. She sits up from her spot and pulls the sheets with her, dressed in his loose dress shirts and folds back the cuffs to her elbows, and he stares at her wrists, but there's nothing proprietary in his gaze. How could there be? A man can't own the very thing that makes him. Can't love his own soul, the breath in his lungs, the blood in his heart.

* * *

They make it about 800 miles when Katniss' father dies.

They're sitting around the campfire as Mrs. Everdeen does her best with the stale biscuits and maggot-infested bacon when his laughter turns into coughing and suddenly he falls over and stops blinking. The whole travel party mourns him the following morning, toasting their coffee and dry bread.

Peeta reaches for Katniss' hand but she does not reach back.

* * *

"This is too heavy without him."

They dump their trinkets into the mud, joining the pile of "leeverites" trailing the road. Keepsakes, heirlooms, wedding gifts. Katniss hurls the cross stitch with an undeniable punch satisfaction.

"May it rest in peace," he says. She smiles, but it does not quite reach her eyes.

* * *

Cholera creeps quietly. He listens to the moans coming from various wagons, the immigrants clutching their stomachs in agony as he smells their sick mix with the caked dirt on the road. Skin starts to wrinkle and turn blue, like a butterfly reversing and crawling back into its skin.

They bury his brother next.

* * *

There is not enough food, so Mrs. Everdeen uses the ox hide over their heads and boils it for them to eat. Peeta raises it to his blistered lips, split from the dry air, and chews it like rubber mixed with his own blood.

He finds Katniss curled against ragged tailcoats, and the sound of dulled campfire singing and dancing seeps through the tent when he lifts the flap. When he lies next to her, she looks at him but he cannot see her eyes.

She's gone from the bright-eyed childhood ideal to this. Sad eyes, sad smile, and he won't lie and say a sick part of him doesn't want to try to break her further.

He leans to taste her, her new rough skin that smells of dust, not the dust of home but the dust of the trail, the trail that has coated itself onto her body and it scares him, the way she looks and the way she moves, so wholly corrupted so he pushes her back against the dirt and licks the taint from her flesh, his mouth not stopping till he can be sure that she is clean, thorough in this consideration and duty.

Beneath him, she makes sounds that he's sure others girls don't, sounds that fill his ears like coins, rich and gasping as the sun makes slow progress around the earth.

* * *

He's forgotten what it feels like to _not_ be in love with her.

* * *

Mrs. Everdeen is healthy at breakfast then dies at nightfall.

They cling onto Prim. It is too late to turn back.

* * *

They shiver against each other, but he insists, "Come on, we're almost there. We're so close."

"Peeta – "

"You are my wife," he says plainly. "That is how I think of you. You are my family. I will protect both of you."

She blinks, the nods. "Yes," she holds Prim's hand. "Husband, my husband."

* * *

He carries Prim on his shoulders with Katniss by his side. He kneels once they reach the cliff, allowing Prim to get off and inch towards the edge. Katniss picks up a rock and tosses it over, watching it disappear into the air, evaporating like mist into steam over the Columbia River.

The merriment is loud behind them, but he grabs Katniss' hand and she looks at him and says simply, "Husband, my husband," and the three of them look out at The Dalles and out at Oregon and they've _made it_. It is not the family he started with, but it is the family he wants.

* * *

Chlorea really is the silent destroyer.

* * *

**New Orleans, Louisiana – 1871**

He doesn't have a choice in the matter, really.

His father is the one who suggests it, standing over the oven and stirring a pot of gumbo. Peeta scoops a bowl and pairs it with some stale cornbread.

"Mother would never allow it."

His father's smile falters. "She would never have to know."

* * *

He has to knock a few times before the door finally opens. He has never been in this part of town before, where the sun is higher and the wind is a little more graceless and unforgiving.

The door creaks open only slightly, just enough for a brilliant grey eye to peek through.

"Hello?" He smiles and takes off his top hat. "My name is Peeta Mellark."

The eye blinks. "What do you want, Mr. Mellark?"

"I…" He tugs at his waistcoat and shifts from one foot to the other. "Well, you see, I require your… expertise."

"I am afraid we are not selling goat cheese or milk today – "

"Not... Not that expertise, ma'am."

"Like I said, we are not open today."

"Please, I just – "

"I'm going to ask you to leave."

"I have money!" Pause. "Paper money, coins. Whatever you prefer."

He hears some tense mumbling behind the door, whispered shouts before an abrupt hush falls over them. Finally, the door opens fully. "Please come in, Mr. Mellark."

* * *

He's never met anyone who has practiced voodoo before. He honestly thought it was a dead art, demolished decades ago with the Yellow Fever Epidemic and the Civil War.

He does hear about them sometimes, in the quarters as he goes past, the tales people tell about her and her sickness and her heart that thirsts only for blood and not love, but they do not bother him. Her name is only another pair of words like any other, like "voodoo" and "priestess" and though you will often hear them said in conjunction to each other, there is no special weight to them, no meaning.

He doesn't want to believe them because he sees a real woman in front of him, with sharp eyes and hollow cheeks and dark fair that falls onto her shoulders like spilt cocoa.

He tries to lean in to listen to her heartbeat, but all he hears is a distorted hum; it sounds the way organs do when they howl alone in empty cathedrals.

* * *

He mixes the liquid bottle with some sweet tea and feeds it to his bed-ridden mother. It's a last resort tactic; he's half afraid this potion will actually kill her.

He wakes up the next morning to his mother's flushed skin and shrill voice: "What do you mean we don't have any more servants! Why? Because of some damn _war_?"

* * *

She opens the door more easily next time. "I wanted to thank you," he hands her a small bouquet of daffodils and magnolias. "It worked."

"Of course it did." But there's a twinkle in her eye; relief, he thinks.

"Well, I see I now know who to come to with future problems."

"I hope not!" She startles him, and after a moment, she finally takes the flowers from his hands. "It's not… Sir, what I do is not _favorable_. I only help out with situations are dire."

"But you have a gift! It's unbelievable. What you do…" He searches for the right words, "you are magic."

She shakes her head disputably, looks past his eyes, and whispers, "I would not visit here often. People will talk."

But avoiding Katniss Everdeen, he'll learn soon enough, is like a magnet trying to avoid the pull of another: impossible.

* * *

But he is tempted. To him, she is a serpent. See a glass of wine and be thirsty. See a serpent and be tempted.

* * *

He picks up a few beignets for his family at Jackson Square – stares at them quizzically and thinks can't be _that_ difficult to make them – when he hears commotion on the street over.

He turns to see a man on ground, groaning, and Katniss staring down at him with a mixture of shock and fury, a bundle of groceries scattered at her feet.

A crowd has gathered around them, and he does not think when he kneels to pick up the groceries and ushers Katniss away; he only realizes what he's doing when he feels the fabric of her wide sleeves shaking against him.

* * *

She's annoyed with this, he knows. She doesn't even follow through for the first few weeks, but when another incident happens, she finally complies and lets him run her errands in town.

"They can insult me all they like, but I will not let them talk about my family like that."

"It's disgraceful," he agrees, and she scowls because she thinks he's just amusing her, which is not true but it also is.

He likes inflicting these reactions from her, finds pleasure in tracing the wrinkles of her nose, thinks he might find his heart somewhere there, tucked tight like a love note hidden in a book by a lover.

But his heart isn't far. He thinks it might be right there at her doorstep.

* * *

He brings the Everdeens their groceries, even fries some okra as they chat a bit. When she brings out a cauldron to cook some beans, Peeta's eyes light up with laughter.

She rolls her eyes. "I'm a priestess, not a witch."

* * *

But his mother wants him to propose to the mayor's daughter.

"But I don't love her. I hardly know her."

"Who said anything about love, my dear?"

* * *

She recites superstitions like how a person hums. She cooks with her left hand and mixes medicine with her right. She speaks in riddles aloud, and when she does so, she answers them herself as if the answer is just another riddle.

It happened in increments, and it mattered in increments, and it has left him across the room from a young devil women whose breath changes the air between them, whose heat he feels making chaos as she melts closer and closer into the stillness in which he sits.

He can't help it.

When he leans in, she allows him to kiss her, allows him to touch his lips full against the length of her own and press down, allows his fingers to splay against the small of her back, the individual digits slipping into the ties of her corset; she allows it and she is still as a statue. She lets out a gasp when his teeth meet the outside of her mouth, toying at her lip when he finally feels her hand graze the back of his neck.

It's a kind of love that he's not familiar with. It grabs hold of him, rattles his heart. Like a rush of wind through a sturdy oak tree.

It's not a kiss - it's a lick and a bite and _then_ a kiss.

She touches him with such conviction that it makes his whole body sort of melt and surge towards her; a helpless moth to a burning flame. He spells out words with his tongue on her skin that he will use to make her immortal.

* * *

Spilt mint julep on her gown, hair coming out of its bind, and at her best Katniss is a mess.

"I am… I am not human. I cannot do this! I don't fall in love with people I'm not with!"

He stares at her, his eyes exasperated and tired, and he feels his breath grow heavier before finally sighing, "You've fallen in love with me?"

She blinks, and suddenly, it's like a wave of relief passes between them. "I'm out of my mind in love with you."

* * *

_What is sharp? _she mutters, chanting. _Fresh vodka in a jar that burns the eyes and throat._  
_What is sharper? Bones under skin that threaten to break._  
_What is sharpest? The teeth of that thing that buries itself in our stomachs and eats away._

He watches her close her eyes, performing her work and tightening bottles and chanting spells to herself. More like lullabies than riddles.

_What is sweet? Thick honey sliding down the back of the throat._  
_What is sweeter? __Sleep when the body forgets it is a body._  
_What is sweetest? _

Suddenly she looks up at him.

_You, Peeta, only you._

* * *

She receives death threats in the mail.

New Orleans has always had too many people and too many beliefs and a city unlike any other where new breeds surface and practices bring people to life.

And Katniss is not what they want anymore and her help is not what they want and her powers are not what they want and he holds her face in his hands and whispers _I want you, I want you, I want you._

* * *

"You should run away," she warns for the eighth time.

"You know, darling... I think I'll just sit."

* * *

If a story is made up of a thousand moments left out of the final version then his is composed of every night spent on his knees praying that they would live to see beyond tomorrow before the city decides to crash down and burn them.

But when gods answer prayers, they always take more than you're willing to give.

* * *

It takes a single bullet, black as the fleeing night and it takes down the house in a brilliant spectacle that lights up the sky like a set of artfully cast fireworks of red and pink and orange. Peeta feels the cold take flight from his bones the way a shot of vodka makes its way through his veins. Ironically, it feels like a celebration, the screams of Katniss' burning family from within sounding more like a series of notes on an organ instead of death.

The blurred outline of Katniss' body approaches him and cradles his head in her arms as he listens to the wailing sounds of their assailants dying in the background.

She holds his death and it swells with her, her skin bright and gleaming and she carries it inside her like a torch. And when he looks past her and sees the burning house, his last thought is that she looks like a girl on fire.

* * *

**Brooklyn, New York - 1923**

He lifts a shot of gin to his lips. There's something in the way his wrist curves when he slams the glass back onto the table.

He claps and whistles along with everyone else when she gets off the stage, the black and silver beads of her dress slapping against the backs of her knees.

He waits for her to come over, does whatever she does beforehand when she's done for the night, and when she settles next to him, he lifts the brim of his fedora and smirks, "What's a girl like you doing in place like this?"

She kisses his lips.

"Now what'd you do that for?"

"Because you wanted me to."

* * *

She looks like a child when she sleeps, but he doesn't let that fool him. Walk by a prison at night, and you'd think it's filled with saints.

But this girl is a gun.

* * *

He didn't grow up in New York, but he's found himself here, and while he tries not to form attachments, he thinks there's something always fresh about it, the way it lights up the sky so bright and shiny. New York is still _new_, even after all this time.

* * *

She glitters on stage in her red shift dress, like weapons tied with diamonds and blood. She's been doing this for so long, but he's impressed how no one ever sees it, how much she hates to perform, how much she hates how they look at her like some kind of new toy out churning its wheels through the windows of Macy's.

He waits for her. She smells like sugar and cigarette smoke. "Got any new dresses lately?"

"I don't know. Robbed any banks lately?"

* * *

He is only a gangster by association.

When he first introduced himself to her, he stood in her living room and took her hand politely and shook it and said, "I'm Peeta. I'm – I'm an associate of your father's."

He was much younger then – back when her father owned the speakeasy – with his hair coiffed back and trousers still a little long. She was young too, maybe just a little younger than him, puncturing him with grey eyes so sharp and strong that he didn't know what to do but just stare and not fidget. He made an attempt to lean in and kiss the back of her hand, but she pulled it away and folded her arms across her chest.

"Didn't know my father needed associates," she said slyly.

* * *

It really leads from one thing to another.

He doesn't make enough money selling papers and society is changing and everyone knows once a social change happens it doesn't stop, doesn't reverse back and forget. So he starts at a speakeasy but no one tells you that once you get your foot in the door, they pull your whole body with it too.

And once you start, they don't let you stop.

He learns this the hard way.

* * *

"What do you miss most about San Francisco?"

He leans into her naked shoulder and rubs his stubble cheek against it, stares at her hair matted with sweat sticking to the sheets. "I miss the noise."

"Brooklyn," the curve of her mouth quirks into a smile, "has noise."

* * *

It's true. New York, really, is only a place.

And she's only flesh and bones that occupies it.

* * *

Jazz is the type of music that when you dance, you never let your feet touch the floor. She's wearing a beaded headpiece that collects light under the dim lamps, and he's drunk and climbs upstage, pulls her by her elbows away from her act, and presses his lips on hers in front of everyone.

She yells at him at the bar. "You made me look like a fool!"

"No, sweetheart," a man nearby slurs. "He made you look _desirable_."

* * *

He's not supposed to kill anyone. That was part of the deal. But red splashes all over the place. His wrinkled white shirt is soaked up to the elbows when he stumbles onto the street like he's late for a date.

The ground spins, and all he can see is the red thread that wound itself out of the mouths of those people, and he feels a hand patting his shoulder, "Good job, son." But he is no one's son, he has no father anymore, and _what did he just do?_

* * *

Turns out, New York isn't so bright, so perfect, so lovely. Just turns out to be a pretty cage. Makes you see things that aren't there, makes you forget who you used to be.

* * *

He approaches her after her song number; doesn't wait for her to come to him this time. He tucks her bobbed hair behind her ear, and she looks at him quizzically, raises an eyebrow before it dawns on her and her full lips part slightly. She tucks his fingers tight into hers and presses it against her chest. "What happened?"

Peeta loves Katniss and he is a fool. Or maybe he is a fool and he loves Katniss.

He nuzzles his face into her shoulder, her hair, her neck, nips at the spot on her lower back that makes her sigh. She makes noises she doesn't make on stage and spreads her legs wide and he pushes into her and she is sultry and willing and loud. He thinks this is passion, calls this passion and when he comes he tells her so and she laughs. Throws her head back and he calls it love and she stops laughing.

Afterwards, his fingers skip up her ribcage, like he's counting her bones even though she could just tell him the answer.

* * *

They don't rob banks together. God forbid, he'd kill himself before he'd let her get tangled in this mess.

It just so happens she has problems staying _put_.

* * *

He's lying naked in his small bed, reading the paper and weaving through the bitterness of his cup of coffee. It's only on the third page, but it's still there: just the photo of the bank post-robbery, as if the black and white is tainted through the pages, and they talk about him like he's some sort of scoundrel or a menace who acted alone but then they mention her and talk about her like she's some kind of rare gem and rave on and on about her sleuth and nice hair.

He drives to the bar just to shake the paper almost domineeringly at her.

She huffs. "Yes. Well. At least they got that last bit right."

* * *

"The first robbery was a mistake. No more for you. You get that, right?"

"Oh, don't be sore. What if I told you I love you?"

His eyes falter and she bites her lip because she knows it's cruel of her to tease him in such a way. He tightens his grip around his glass, skin stretched over bone so tight it looks like it might burst, and it's wonder after all these years, she still has never picked up a drink.

"It's not for the rush, you know." Pause. "My family needs more money than me trotting around on stage."

"Then I'll help you."

"Oh, I'm not one for taking help," she hisses.

They walk out into the street outside, a warm spring night, and a homeless man asks them for money. He frowns sadly, and she turns out her empty pockets and shrugs at him before getting into a cab.

The homeless man calls her mean.

Peeta shakes his head. "She's not mean. She's just misunderstood."

* * *

She's not the one who tells him. Has to hear it from the _bartender_ of all people.

He doesn't know what to do first. Scold her for robbing alone or kneel down and kiss her stomach.

* * *

"What do you wanna do?" He looks at her with eyes that plead whatever you want, _I'll do whatever you want_.

She stares at her bare stomach, as if waiting for it to rise almost instantaneously, and he spreads his fingers over it, claiming it, _mine_.

She looks at him. "What's San Francisco like?"

* * *

They could do it. Could just hop on a train and runaway.

It is a balancing act, which means only some things matter and other things don't.

He reaches for her hand and clasps it tight. These are the things that matter.

* * *

They are no longer in the papers, no longer in the bar, the speakeasy. They are on a train, somewhere, just the two of them (the two and a half?).

Katniss laughs through the ruin of her mouth.

It really doesn't matter where they end up; they'll be back again.

* * *

**Los Angeles, California – 1950**

"Forty-seven!"

He blinks, turns his head to the front of the classroom and sees his teacher staring down at him. Half the class is staring at him too, actually. His classmate behind him nudges him slightly, and Peeta gulps and repeats, "It's – er – forty-seven."

"Correct. And no more dawdling, Mr. Mellark."

He nods obediently and looks down at his desk, feels the heat in his face turning something red. But after awhile, he just can't help it. He glances casually (longingly) at the girl seated near the window, her attention so detached from the classroom he wonders what world she is in this time.

* * *

He does this every Monday.

He knows he's being annoying. Knows it since the moment he started, in the winter of their junior year of high school. He would have started freshman year, _truly_ he would, but it took him a little while to get over the fear of her. Get over the fear of girls in general, their mystique, their bouncy curls and pink lips and dainty wrists and the way their bodies fold and curve under their pastel blouses in ways he just...

Oh, he's a teenager,_ all right_?

She's at her locker, almost posted there as if waiting to take flight. He figures she just waits for him now, eager to get it over with.

"Hi."

"Hello."

"It's Monday."

"I'm aware."

"Would you like to go steady with me?"

She slams her locker with such force that her ponytail bounces like a spring on a board. She turns to him, a tight smile on her lips, and says, "Not this week, Peeta."

"Next Monday, then?" He calls to her retreating figure and her circle skirt that sway, sways, sways against the back of her calves.

* * *

It's ironic, really, when you contrast Katniss' attraction to him and to nearly every other girl at school.

He pumps gas down at the service station on the same street as the local diner. The owner doesn't make him wear those stuffy button ups and sports coats like the other stations do, so when he slips into his worn jeans and white tee, hair slicked back with some of his brother's pomade, and the girls come flocking like a moth to a flame.

"Wow, Peeta," they chant together like muses in the chorus, "You look so _cool_."

"Really _far out_."

He smiles bashfully, usually takes one of them out for a milkshake later. That's his version of romance. He figures Katniss' version of romance is like striking matches against skin.

* * *

They get their first television set, a late Christmas gift for the entire family. They eat split pea soup and tuna casserole for dinner and watch _The Goldbergs _together.

"They say another one of these shows is going on air soon. About a woman named Lucy."

His mother scoffs. "Women do not need to be on television."

* * *

He adjusts the collar of his tartan shirt. "Any chance you'd wanna be my girlfriend?"

"Happy Monday, Peeta."

"Odds just aren't in my favor, huh?"

* * *

In between school and work and wrestling practice and football practice and parties and friends and family, his attention is caught between his real life and this imaginary life, one with an audience and a laugh track and he's in black and white and so is she and he sings through his mouth, "_Katniss, I'm homeeee!_"

But no – _no_ – he thinks she's a three-dimensional girl born in a two dimensional world.

* * *

They lose the big football game, and half of the school goes under the bleachers to get drunk, and the other half head to the diner, and his mouth almost drops when he sees her, trotting along her little blonde sister as they leave a finished vanilla milkshake at a red vinyl booth.

He's walking, then he's running, skipping, flying towards her: "Can I walk you home?"

She doesn't even get a say in because all three of them are already out the door, his letterman jacket wrapped around little Prim against the night's cold. He carries her when she falls asleep, and Katniss mutters a "thank you."

"Aw, don't sound so excited." He teases, and she makes a face. Silence.

"Sorry about your game."

"You watched?"

"No. But I heard people talking."

"Yeah. Well. Better you weren't there then."

"Why?"

"Oh. Well..." He scrunches his face, doesn't know how to explain it. "Didn't want you to see me embarrass myself, I guess?"

"And you don't think asking me to go steady every Monday doesn't?"

_Touche_.

* * *

"Heard you walked Everdeen home last night."

A round of kissing noises fill the locker room. He rubs a towel on the back of his head, throws it at one of his teammates, and mumbles, "Cool it."

But he wonders if under all their laughter, they can hear it. Hear the beat of his heart, how he can even feel love in his bloodstream.

* * *

It's petty of him really, when he gets jealous when he sees her talking with other guys.

But then he laughs when she just blinks at them because the only real threat is Katniss herself.

* * *

"Beautiful Monday."

"Mmhmm."

"Wanna go steady?"

"Oh, Peeta. Maybe next week."

That's not a _no_.

* * *

He doodles in math. While girls are in econ class and boys are in shop, he thinks he could be an artist (_hah_ – hardly, maybe in another life), so he takes pictures and puts them into words instead and writes poems on the side of his notes, tucked away where no one else can see, like how a kiss can be hidden in the corner of a mouth.

_I promise I will let you hog my side of the bed. I will let you eat the last few bites of pie even though we made it together. I will put my feet on your lap without asking for your permission, and I will tell you I'm fine when we both know I'm not. I will call you up – both when I say I will and whenever I feel like it. I will not make fun of the way you run, but I will ask you to tell me stories about your childhood. I will listen. I will always let you know when I'm angry with you, and I will always try my best not to cry in front of you. I will anyways. I will make sure you feel safe. I will try to order food for you. I will mess up. I will do it again anyways. And I will love you. I will love you. I will love you._

* * *

"We can't keep meeting like this."

"At _my_ locker?"

"Eh, logistics," he waves it off.

"Is there something you want to ask me?"

"As a matter of fact, there is!"

"I'm baffled, truly."

"Would you go to the dance with me?"

"...That's a new one."

"So would you?"

"Peeta..."

"You didn't say no.."

"I don't go to dances."

"Then we'll go for the food then leave."

"I don't think that's how it works."

"Then how does this work, Katniss? Please, enlighten me. I'd love to know."

They're not talking about dances anymore, and it's in these spaces between the words that they lose themselves, that they think they might find each other again.

* * *

She fights over letting him pick her up in his tailfin car. Something about her house being too small, but he just shakes his head, insisting, "nonsense, I'm only one guy. Can't take up that much room."

But she wins, of course she wins, because saying no to her is like jumping off a building and trying to fight gravity.

He waits for her in front of school, hands stuffed in his suit pockets and hair combed back slick and stylish, and it's only by chance that he sees her at the most perfect moment; walking towards him, standing under the champagne moonlight light, stars like silver peppers against the dark sky, and it's like she was born to be there. Her with her velvet curls and rosy lips, pinching her homemade cotton dress between her fingers. He thinks, in his wildest imagination, he can be the Gable to her Lombard. Tracy to her Hepburn. Bogart to her Bacall.

She looks uncomfortable, approaches him a weird face. "I look silly."

But his eyes are soft and genuine and he absently touches her loose braid. "I didn't know someone could be so pretty."

* * *

"You're having an awful time, aren't you?"

"I'm all right."

"Come on, let's get outta here."

"No, really."

"You really are a lousy liar."

"When have I ever lied to you?"

"Only every Monday."

* * *

He fidgets with the poem in his left hand and drives with his right. He hasn't come all this way, hasn't loved her for this long to just drive her home. He doesn't know where he's going, just moving aimlessly to kill time and work up the courage to pass a simple note, to hand it to her, like one current passing through another.

And when he hands it to her, he feels his heart leap to his throat, wants to fold her up in his note and in her answer and breathe it in until she relaxes in the absoluteness of it. He starts to recite it in his head,_ I promise I will..._

And then his mind goes fuzzy and dark and eventually blank, like the television set in his home, with it's black and white pictures, quiet then no sound.

* * *

When the television turns on the next morning, blinding in its black and white, the news anchor reveals his somber headline: "Two teens killed by a drunk driver in a car accident after their prom night."

* * *

**Washington, D.C. - 2013**

They move in a circle - he keeps coming back to the same spot, she keeps running away.

Or maybe it's the other way around. Does it matter?

Circles, his tongue clicks. Circles.

* * *

"I thought we were friends."

The word stings him more than he realizes. Eventually, he turns around, but when she looks at him, he feels like a deer trapped in headlights, caught between his emotions and hers. "We were."

"So when did we stop?"

"I don't know." He shrugs lightly. "Look, the Chief of Staff is going to call any moment, and I still have to wrap up my notes. And I haven't even begun to look at the new education bill proposal, so if you don't mind – "

She purses her lips. "Peeta - "

"You broke my heart, Katniss," he says plainly. "I don't really want to talk to you right now."

* * *

But that's the thing about breakups. They break; they're broken.

Then they fall apart.

* * *

The thing is, he's not vindictive. And neither is she. He's just never had his heart broken before, was not prepared for the way it savages you body and makes a wreck out of you, the aftermath of Hurricane Katniss. He doesn't how to just jump back from this – how to stop a relationship and how to start another – how sad it makes him to have to talk to her like she's a stranger, not the girl whose secrets he carries, whose memories he can make a fort out of.

* * *

"I left the follow up paper on your desk, as well as the President's comments."

"Thank you."

"If you want, you can phone line two for the actual tapes. I'm sure they've stored them already."

"They probably have."

"Well. Will that be all?"

"Yes."

But she doesn't turn to leave, just looks at him tiredly and exasperated like he's a stubborn little child. "I can't fucking do this anymore."

"I'm sorry?"

"This small talk." He doesn't respond. "For Christ's sake, you've come inside me, Peeta I think we can get past this."

Her bluntness shouldn't shock him, but he still knocks his American Flag pencil off his desk. "I – yes. Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay. Goodnight then, congressman. And Happy Holidays."

* * *

He's called "the Golden Boy of Virginia" when he first enters Congress. He's quite young and inexperienced but he's wonderfully brilliant and attractive. They like him for his looks and for his mind, crack jokes at him like, "This is what the future of Congress will look like. A male model calendar for women."

It doesn't bug him, not really. Because the attention is less than harmless when he sweeps a US Representative from Arizona off his feet about the rights of women's birth control.

So not only is he smart and handsome, but both Democratic and Republican women _adore_ him. And that's quite a percentage on his side.

* * *

It's him who offers her a job. He's not even sure he's allowed such power, but he sees her speak briefly at a protest in favor of undocumented workers, and she doesn't say much, but her presence is so intimidating and alluring that he follows her off the stage and proposes a position as a congressional staffer.

She raises an eyebrow. "Are you trying to get me to sleep with you?"

"Wha – no! Miss," he laughs nervously, "No, I do not want to sleep with you."

Little do they know.

* * *

When they do start sleeping together, it's not romantic. They just work late nights and awful hours and their jobs are just so _stressful_.

They come in the mornings separately, and she hands him a cup a coffee and rattles on about reform, as if nothing has changed between them. Only hours ago was she tied up in his bed, wrists fastened tightly above her head as she had her legs spread out on that simple cotton sheet with him smirking between her thighs.

There are bruises on her knuckles where she banged them carelessly against the headboard.

It's a few weeks later when he feels something burrowing in his stomach when he looks at her, realizes she may be the most beautiful girl he's ever seen.

* * *

"I wish you were my girlfriend."

She laughs in his face until he realizes he's not joking. "You're serious."

"Scout's honor."

"It's against the rules," then adds as an afterthought, "And you were never an Eagle Scout."

"No. It's _frowned_ upon by the rules."

"I really don't think this is a good idea."

"Fine. Will you be my... Oh. Be my lover?"

"What, you mean your whore?"

"No! Jesus, no. Okay how about... be – be my..."

"Your...?"

"Exactly. Just be mine."

* * *

They compare him to JFK, and there are lewd comments said about him and his charm and his behavior towards women. And his secretaries.

He _does_ have secretaries, but they go unfucked. He's found what he needs in one girl, a girl who everyone else calls ordinary, but he sees a beautiful kind of ordinary he just can't leave alone.

* * *

But things happen, and "that's just life," his brother uselessly says. But that's it, isn't? There are no rules, no laws, no mandate on how to handle these kind of things. Open an anatomy book, and which page do you turn for the section on soul?

The human brain has fifty-billion neurons with some thousand-trillion synaptic connections passing signals throughout. No one ever said any of these had to be about love.

* * *

She wears a green dress at the President's Ball and stands near the corner making no attempt to look the least bit interested. Still, she looks pretty but damaged, like an old corsage left behind in the back of a limo, and when he approaches her, she jumps a bit, looks startled. "It was stuffy over there," she musters. "Didn't think you'd notice."

"I may not be your boyfriend anymore, but I still notice you."

And he knows he has it bad when he really should be paying attention to the President and First Lady walking in, but there's just so _much_ on his mind (like how his tongue would fit perfectly in that gap of her cleavage).

Katniss is no dummy. She knows when a man wants her and when it will work in her favor. He's always admired a woman who knows how to survive on her own.

So when they share a cab back home, she shows no indecency in pressing her body intentionally against his, the satin fabric of her strapless gown scratching against his tux. It starts on her cheeks and then her lips and then her neck, each lick followed by a trail of butterfly kisses, quick and sharp and needy – like a pin to a board.

* * *

"You looked good tonight."

She laughs and gets out of bed for a cup of water. "Yeah, you too."

"This is strange, huh? Of all the places. Who would've thought?"

"Oh, Peeta." She wraps a robe around herself and leans against the door frame, cradling a glass in her hands.

"What?"

"We were always like this."

* * *

When she quits the next day, he finds out she's been offered a legislative director job for a few months now. "Why did you wait until now to take it?" he calls her.

"We needed to say goodbye first."

It's not enough. He drives to her apartment, takes her hands into his, and kisses each knuckle until its flushed and pink. "Katniss – "

"You should go."

"Just look at me."

"No."

"Look at me."

"Why?"

"Because when you look at me, I can't remember why we're not together anymore."

"Peeta." And he sees something wet shimmer in her eyes. "If I broke your heart once before, I think I might do it again."

* * *

When they see each other now, it's often brief, short words, no smiles. They have to run into each other – it's their career, their world; D.C. is a concrete arena that never ends, drags you and your gladiator thoughts down with it. But he has a wedding band on now and she doesn't and he's going to be more than a congressman some day and she regrets ever going into politics.

But sometimes – sometimes – he catches her gaze, and they hold it for a second too long, and she is the who looks away first.

Circles, he thinks. Circles.

**District 12, Panem – Unknown Future**

What happens – _well –_ what happens is that in every lifetime, there is a moment where he remembers.

And he is always the one who remembers it first.

This time, it's in District 12, after the war and after they return. She kneels and tends to her garden of primroses, and he doesn't know _how,_ but it happens. It's the smallest of triggers: her grey eyes catching sunlight, tucking a strand of unruly hair behind her ear, a look of compliance and serenity.

He nearly drops the cheese rolls from his hands.

He rushes towards her, grabs her whole face in his hands, shaking, one life remembered right after another, _real or not real_, and her eyes widen because she thinks he's having another episode but – but –

He remembers. This is his soulmate. And even though he knows they'll see each other again, that there will be other lifetimes shared, he can't help but think: is this the last time? Is this really you? After all these years, the same hair, the same eyes, the same feeling of love; the same girl he's belonged to for centuries at a time.

He waits for her to remember; she always does, eventually, but sometimes it takes her a bit more time than him. It's only fair though, he reasons, that he should be the one who chases her across ten, fifty, a hundred lifetimes, if it means she'll eventually come back to him.

And he sees it: the flicker in her eyes, and she just gasps and clutches onto him and mumbles into his hair, _"It's you."_

Where their hearts should be, they stick, the two of them caught in time.

Only love makes the difference.

* * *

Yes, yes, I know, you've felt like you've read this story before. I just can't help myself.

Anywhoo, reviews are always appreciated! Or just stop by and say hi, tell me how you're feeling.

(P.S. I finally have a new Tumblr again! lukescoolhand

Okay, have a good day!)


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